As my reward for supporting her in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, I get a custom-written story by the talented Kelley Eskridge.
The story-prompt I gave Kelley was a pair of videos from the YouTube subgenre of “kids being stalked by zoo animals” (hat tip to james_nicoll and his commenters for turning me onto these):
Kelley’s story is here. Enjoy!
Via BoingBoing, the Instructables website offers a home recipe for Pop Rocks.
I just ran across this story about the world’s first transgenic dog, a beagle puppy with sea anemone DNA that causes it to fluoresce red under ultraviolet light. If memory serves, this same trick was done previously with rabbits (although I think the bunnies glowed green rather than red).
What I haven’t heard of yet is somebody creating a mammal that can glow without the UV light. Does anyone know if that would be technically possible, and if so, how much more difficult it would be?
My friend Pablos Holman gave a lecture at Seattle’s Town Hall last week. After about half an hour of cranking up Lisa’s security phobia with stories about bump keys, RFID scanners, and other fun hacker tricks, Pablos talked about the work going at the local mad scientists’ consortium, Intellectual Ventures. Recent projects include an anti-mosquito laser fence and a nuclear reactor that uses depleted uranium as fuel.
Pablos also showed a cool bit of video, filmed with a special camera capable of capturing 250,000 frames per second, of a “quarter shrinker” designed by Hackerbot Labs. [Update: The original video is no longer available, but here’s a longer video explaining how the quarter shrinker works and showing the results.]